Tuesday, June 29, 2010

The last time I spoke to one of my nephews, he was an angry, rebellious teenager. I asked him how he was doing at school, and he gave me this you-really-don't-have-a-clue look and said, "It's all bullshit." I thought, I guess it's not going so well. What a shame, that he came to that extreme attitude about learning.

Then I reflected on my own high school years, which were in the early 1960s. I never made any grade lower than A during my 12 years of schooling. I was considered a smart kid. I was the valedictorian of my graduating class. But now, looking back from the perspective of 50 years, I have to say that some of it was helpful. But to be honest, most of it was irrelevant to the rest of my life. It was stuff the system had decided ought to be in the curriculum.

As for any useful knowledge that I now possess, 95% of it I learned on my own after I received my Ph.D. in 1977.

I think it's sad that this is the case. And as I continue to hear that the problems of education are getting worse, even as the world becomes more challenging, I wish this were not the case. I wish kids went to school hungry to learn, and that they were learning things they felt they needed to know.

I know there are some exciting experiments going on, but this has always been happening, and for some reason they don't get much traction. State Boards of Education meet and make decisions about curricula based on petty political agendas.

"We need a wave of social entrepreneurship to create highly motivating, low cost ways to learn."

This radical statement was made by Charles Leadbeater, who spoke at TED about the failure of our current archaic educational paradigms. Obviously they don't work in poor, developing countries. And they don't work in the advanced, developed world, either.

In the 20-minute format of TED, he only had time for truth-telling. He's been all over the world, and he's seen some amazing education success stories. He explained why certain radical new approaches to learning are succeeding in the developing world, and why we need to adopt these approaches everywhere.

The kinds of things he's suggesting are exactly what I've imagined for school systems in the modern world. But hey, listen for yourself....

Denny Coates

About Me

I'm the creator of customized versions of ProStar Coach, a new kind of online virtual coaching service for developing personal strength and people skills. I’ve been in the learning and development business for over 35 years, and CEO of Performance Support Systems, Inc., since 1987. During that time, all my work has been focused on helping people learn and grow stronger for the challenges of life and work.

About "Personal Strength"....

When you're trying to build physical strength, it helps to have workout equipment and a personal trainer. That's what ProStar Coachprovides for developing personal strength - 24/7 virtual coaching in an online virtual gym.

Personal strengths are behavior patterns that we ingrain throughout our lives, such as compassion, courage, patience, composure, self-discipline, and dozens more. Like knowledge, skills, values, attitudes and forms of power, personal strengths help us be more effective when working through tough challenges.

For each person, some patterns will be stronger than others. And just like any aspect of physical strength, through repetition you can build up any aspect of personal strength.